In The Wreckage: A Tale of Two Brothers (10 page)

“Didn’t bring it, left it on the ship. Stupid, we could use a hidden weapon right about now. Didn’t think I’d need it, not carrying a gun.”
 

“Would the townsfolk help us? The mayor, the council?”

“Might, if they knew, hard to say,” Jonah said. “Can’t all be slavers. But are these a few bad men? Or are they in power? Got a lot of people behind them, I’d say, taking us like that in broad daylight, public place. Didn’t see anyone rushing from the inn to help us. And the women upstairs, they’d have seen. Must’ve known, all along.” He cursed under his breath and spat on the floor.
 

Conall put his hands in front of his face and walked until he found the wall. He moved along it tracing the outline of the room. Ten foot square, with a metal door in one corner. He listened, his ear pressed against the cold iron. Jonah rustled, sat on the floor on the far side, shuffling his position, grumbling under his breath. Conall urged him to be quiet. “Voices, someone’s coming.”

Gruff voices, mean and business-like, rumbled on the other side of the door. “They’re here. Do we try?”
 

“Bide your time. They’re not fools.”
 

A key turned in the lock. Conall stepped to one side, lurking in the darkness. The door swung open and a bright light blinded him. The door was kicked wide. Four men stood there, two holding guns.
 

“No trouble or you die here, understand?”
 

“Aye, right enough,” Jonah said.
 

“Where’s the young one? Forward.”
 

Conall hesitated, looked to Jonah for direction, but no word came. The light through the door showed Argent’s face, set hard, proud but defeated, a rage simmering deep down, helpless.
 

“Hold your hands in front of you, wrists together, step forward. Now,” one of the slavers said. He spoke English, but with a strong accent.
 

Conall looked again to Jonah, his heart racing, ready for action. The first mate refused to look at him, but gave a nod of the head. There would be no last-ditch fight for freedom. They’d walk tamely into slavery.
 

Conall stepped into the light and two of the men grasped his arms, pulled him forward, knocked him to his knees. They put a metal collar round his neck, cold and hard against his skin. He struggled to break free. One of the men kicked him in the back, another held a gun against his forehead and told him to keep still. One twitch from death, a bullet would shatter his brains before he heard the sound. There’d be no time for pain or fear. Instant. Slavery would be a long, slow torment, a constant regret for a life lost. But there was hope, and Conall wasn’t ready to give up. He’d stay alive, bide his time, as Jonah said.
 

A padlock clicked shut and the metal collar was fixed. The men passed a metal chain through a hoop on the collar, then called Jonah forward. The first mate didn’t try to fight or resist. He knelt beside Conall, face stern, showing little emotion. This was his act of defiance, to show no fear or suffering. To accept his fate, for now.
 

The men chained Jonah’s collar so the two of them were joined, then yanked them to their feet.
 

“No trouble, it won’t help you none,” one of the men said.
 

They stood in a courtyard outside the brick shed that had been their prison. In front of them stood a gateway and a road beyond. “Keep walking. Meet us at the headland,” one of the slavers said.

One of the men, as big as Jonah, six foot four and broad with it, took hold of the chain. He slung it over his shoulder. “You follow. Keep up.” Behind them, another man cracked a whip. “Or else,” the man snarled.
 

The big man hauled on the chain and led them through the gateway to a rough track. Below them Conall saw the houses of Hammerfest. They were on the edge of the town, far from the bar where they’d been seized, out of sight of the port. No way to know if
The Arkady
was still there. Conall looked to the east, where the sun had risen above distant mountains. Mid-morning, he guessed. He’d been unconscious through the night. A whole day. How long would the captain wait?
 

 
The men told them to walk, heading uphill towards a solitary building, a rough wooden barn beyond the last of the houses. When they reached it the slavers greeted another man slouched on a stone seat, a rifle across his legs.
 

“No trouble? Get ‘em linked and moving.”
 

Four more men were led out of the barn, metal collars around their necks. They looked in their late twenties, early thirties, fit and strong. Two were badly bruised. They carried a dejected, defeated look, as if there was no fight left in them.
 

The men were joined to the back of the chain connecting Conall and Argent, and the procession set off again, now guarded by three men, still heading uphill.
 

After an hour of walking they were told to sit and rest. “Where are they taking us?” Conall whispered the words out of the side of his mouth while their guards stood a way off, smoking pipes.
 

“Out of town,” Jonah said. “Put us on a ship without anyone seeing. Then take us somewhere to be sold, or put to work.”

They marched again, heading higher, until they rounded a shoulder of the hill and saw the sea spread out below, littered with islands. And there, heading north, the distinctive white hull and sails of a three masted barque.
The Arkady
had sailed without them. “They’re leaving.”
 

“They’ve no choice,” Jonah growled. “No way to find us. Best thing for it, get the ship safe.”
 

A guard pulled on the chain. “March,” he yelled.

Conall took a last look at the ship. Faro was on board. Did he even know Conall was missing? Or would he find out when they reached Svalbard, only then discover his younger brother was gone? Rufus was on the ship, too. Heather would care for him. All he had to do was to find Heather. But how?

The slaver shoved him in the back and Conall walked, trudging uphill, knowing if he ever got free of these men it would take weeks, months to find a way to Svalbard. Months before he’d see any of them again.
 

“I know what you’re thinking boy,” Jonah growled. “Forget it all. The past, future, friends, hopes. Survive, nothing else. Survive and wait.”
 

 
The path across the mountain turned to the north-east, dropping towards the fjord. It was a weary walk, the captives weak from beatings and hunger. Conall’s throat was parched with thirst, but to ask for a drink would bring more beatings. He plodded on until the sun had passed noon. Still no food or drink. Only walking.

They plunged into dark woods, following a track through pine trees that stretched from sea level half way up the hillside. They emerged above a sheltered bay where a thirty foot sailboat lay moored to a wooden jetty. The convoy of chained men headed for the boat, the slavers shouting at them. Two men appeared from the boat, talked to the slavers, then came to inspect their haul of workers. The new men walked up and down the line, pausing in front of Jonah, eyeing him as if they didn’t much like what they saw. They spoke rapidly in a strange language. Conall took it to be Norwegian, but as the men moved away, Jonah whispered, “Russians.”
 

 
The slaves were led onto the boat, taken below deck and ordered into a cramped room at the front, still chained together.
 

“Water,” Conall said to one of the Russians, and made a gesture of drinking. The man cursed and spat, but poured a cup of water from a barrel on deck. The men took sips, passing it down the line. Then Conall ducked his head and stepped into the storage room aft, a cramped, airless compartment barely big enough for the six men. The door slammed shut leaving them in darkness. Shouts came from the Russians, an engine purred into life, and the boat pulled away. After ten minutes, the Russians killed the engine and put up her sails. Conall knew the sounds well by know, found himself rehearsing the names, the actions. And counting the footsteps. “There’s only three of them.”
 

“Armed, though,” Jonah whispered back. “And we’re chained together. Wouldn’t want to fall overboard, not like this. Or sail a boat, even if we did overpower ‘em. Which we wouldn’t.”
 

Conall sensed Jonah following the motions of the boat, working out where they were headed.
 

“East,” Argent said.
 

“What does that mean?”
 

“Russia, Murmansk maybe, who can tell.”
 

The four other captives spoke together in whispers. Conall heard enough to know they weren’t Russians, must be Norwegians. One of them spoke to him in broken English, told him they were fishermen from Akkafjord. They’d been taken off their boat at gunpoint, led through Hammerfest in chains in the dead of night, their mouths taped so they couldn’t call for help. They spoke of pirates and slavers, growing in number, haunting the northern towns, pillaging villages, always seeking out more men to take into captivity.

“Why do they need so many slaves?”
 

The men didn’t know, and said the stories were guesses or lies or people turning their worst fears into truth.
 

The rocking of the boat grew stronger as it moved into open waters.
 

“Good thing we’re all sailors,” Jonah said. “Wouldn’t want a sick one in with us, pressed in here.”

Conall’s limbs ached from being crushed into a corner of the room, knees in the air. The collar round his neck weighed him down, digging into his skin when he tried to rest his head on the wall. His back and shoulders were sore from the beatings and the skin on his wrists had been rubbed raw from the bindings. The more he focused on the pain, the worse it got, until he made himself stop. He thought instead of Lerwick, of times with Rufus, wandering the island, alone and desperate but free. Free to go anywhere on the Shetland mainland, explore the other islands too when he persuaded fishermen to take him across. Days and weeks spent roaming the landscape, watching the sea and skies, playing with the dog, foraging for food. His life had seemed hard at the time, but now that felt like a dream. He thought of Faro, locked in the brig of
The Arkady
. He’d be angry and cursing his fate, but he didn’t know his luck. At least Faro would make it to Svalbard. He might find their parents. At least they would learn Conall was alive, somewhere, that he’d been looking for them.
 

Before dark, the Russians brought a thin gruel, gave them more water. Conall slept fitfully, dozing and waking repeatedly. The Norwegians spoke less and less the longer the voyage lasted. The men in that cramped space retreated into their thoughts, their fears and memories and hopes, not knowing what waited for them.
 

They sailed all the next day and into the night, before finally Conall heard sounds of making port. The boat was moored alongside a jetty. More voices drifted from outside, speaking Russian. The door opened and the men ordered them out. They led them onto the deck and along the rickety gangplank. It swayed as the boat rocked on the wake of a passing fishing boat.
 

Around the quay stood ruined buildings, miles of concreted roads and hard surface, pitted with grasses, shrubs and trees that had forced their way through, tough roots breaking up the old world. A watery sun shone through early morning mist, and Conall could make out mountains to the west, south and east. They had travelled up a narrow bay or inlet several miles wide.
 

The Russians shouted at him and he lowered his eyes, head slumped forward.
 

Ahead of them, a group of men in black clothes waited, their faces invisible as they lurked in the shade of a tall brick building. One of them held a whip loosely in one hand. He shouted orders and the Russians from the boat responded, spurring Conall on.
 

“More Russians,” Jonah whispered. “Across the old border, I reckon.”

One of the men grabbed the chain and dragged the line of captives towards a door. As it opened, a stench of humanity hit Conall with full force. Sweat and shit and piss and vomit and fear. Despair. The man with the whip shouted as they reached the door, and the men unchained the slaves, then pushed each of them inside.
 

Conall stepped into a huge space, hundreds of feet across, the roof pitted with skylights through which sunlight filtered, dim and defuse. The building was one big open space, featureless and empty but for a sea of people, men sitting on the floor, scattered groups of women huddled together, even children who looked as young as nine or ten.

Behind them, the door slammed shut.
 

“Someone’s got a plan,” Jonah said. “Putting a lot of work into this.”
 

“Who needs so many slaves? What do they do?”
 

“Hard to say, though I reckon we’ll find out soon enough,” Jonah said. “Find a space, get some rest. Nothing we can do but wait.”
 

Jonah lowered himself to the floor and rested with his back against the wall. Conall stood over the first mate for a moment. “Gonna look around.”
 

“Watch yourself.” Jonah stretched his legs straight, put his head against the wall and closed his eyes.
 

Conall stalked the room, glad of the chance to walk after hours cramped up in the boat. Most of the people looked away, not wanting to be seen or spoken to, trying to be invisible. Others stared back at him in defiance, as if hungry for someone to confront. All around there was a confusing babble of languages.
 

He studied the mass of people. They had clumped into groups. On the far side from the door, a group of thirty or more in distinctive clothes, made from rough spun wool and animal hides. The men sat in a circle outside the women and children as if protecting them. They had the look of an entire tribe taken prisoner. The fisherman from the boat had drifted to the centre of the room. They talked with a group of around twenty men, wearing the same cotton shirts, patterned wool jumpers. In one corner sat a huddled group of children protected by a handful of women. They glared at Conall as he approached, defiant and ready to fight to defend their young. He passed by, trying to signal that he meant no harm.